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What I'm writing in YEAR OF THE DOG

I just finished writing Year of the Dog ! It had a massive plot hole that I had to fix which turned out to be more work than I expected. Here’s a snippet: “Hey, Auntie Nell.” He wrapped his arms around her, bussing her on the cheek and breathing in pikake flowers and shortbread cookies. And suddenly he was nine years old again, and her solid presence had made his chaotic world stable once more. “What are you doing here?” He usually took her to dinner on Wednesday nights, but today was Tuesday. The edges of her smile faltered a little before brightening right back up again. “What, I can’t visit my nephew?” She angled around him to enter his home. “Is this your new house? Looks lovely.” Which was a blatant lie, because the fixer-upper was barely livable, much less acceptable to a neat-freak like his aunt. She also left four matching pink and purple floral suitcases on the stoop behind her. Only then did Ashwin notice the cab driver standing slightly to the side of the walkway. “Can ...
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Scanning recipes

I admit, I’m going a little nuts with my scanner.

Blame it on ebooks. I’ve been getting used to the convenience of having electronic copies of paper, which don’t take up space on my bookshelf.

I am one of those infamous people who cut recipes out of the newspaper and keep them, intending to one day make them. And so I have a folder FULL of clipped recipes which I don’t want to throw away because I might actually want to make one of them one of these days.

But then I remembered, I HAVE A SCANNER.

So I’ve been scanning my recipes in as .pdf files, and I use AABBY FineReader Express for Mac to transfer the .pdf files into a text file. Voila! Electronic copy! Goodbye lots of little newspaper clippings! I’m free! I’m free!

(Okay, maybe I’m overreacting a tad.)

The OCR reader software isn’t perfect, it seems to enjoy turning fractions into faintly derogatory nonsense words which I have to edit in the .rtf file. But on a whole, I am definitely happy to have electronic copies of these recipes, even though Jesus will probably return before I make most of them.
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